New Yorkers don’t seem to like umbrellas very much. Or perhaps they just don’t like owning or carrying them. Whenever a decent amount of rainfall hits, they all buy cheap $5 street corner umbrellas, use them for a day, then toss them into trash cans when it stops raining. I call them “donebrellas.”
I’m not entirely sure why people are so quick to discard their umbrellas. It might be that they just don’t feel like carrying them around when they don’t need them anymore (and, at five bucks a pop, figure they can afford to chuck them). Or it might be that they’re so poorly-made, they don’t last the day (I’ve never seen a single donebrella that didn’t look like it had been thrown into a wood chipper). But whatever the reason, if you walk around Manhattan right after a good rain, you’ll find almost every trash can overflowing with used-up, beaten-down, broken, sad, donebrellas.
